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Madiha Tahir interview

Steve Cannane interviews Madiha Tahir, the Pakistani American journalist who made the film Wounds of Waziristan which documents drone attacks in the region.

Transcript

STEVE CANNANE, PRESENTER: Pakistani politician Imran Khan has threatened to block supply lines to NATO forces in Afghanistan if the US does not end drone strike this month.

The US is being accused of undermining the planned peace talks between the Pakistan Government and the Pakistani Taliban after they killed the militant group's leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, a week ago.

The issue of drone strikes has been on the agenda in the US as well. Recently a family who had lost their grandmother to an alleged drone strike testified before Congress, and this week a documentary that shines a light on civilian casualties from drone attacks was broadcast on American television.

(EXTRACT FORM WOUNDS OF WAZIRISTAN FILM)

SADDAM (TRANSLATED): My mother told me to get my sister-in-law. I told her ok, you go, I'll get her. I already knew she was martyred. But I didn't want to tell my mother because she would cry.

After the attack, my brother came home. He asked about his baby daughter, I told him she was alive but he found out. He went into shock.

(END OF EXTRACT)

STEVE CANNANE: Madiha Tahir is the Pakistani American journalist who made that film 'Wounds of Waziristan' and she joins us now from New York City.

Madiha Tahir, welcome to Lateline.

NEW YORK, MADIHA TAHIR, JOURNALIST AND FILMMAKER: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

STEVE CANNANE: We just saw a very small snippet of an interview you did with Saddam, the young Pakistani schoolboy who lost his baby niece and his sister-in-law in a drone attack, an attack that nearly killed him as well. Can you tell us a bit more about his story?

MADIHA TAHIR: Sure. That was Saddam. He was actually asleep nearby when the drone attack happened and it happened at night, as most of them do, and in the process of that attack, a part of their house was entirely damaged and ruined, and his sister in law, as well as his niece who was less than a year old died. Saddam survived that attack, but he actually is not - you know, he doesn't feel relief about it. He is absolutely shattered about it and he talks about that in the film.

STEVE CANNANE: In fact, at the end of the film he says he was no longer here, he wished he had died in that attack?

MADIHA TAHIR: Yes. So that's what I was looking at in the film, is that I think in a lot of the discussions about drones, we end up actually focusing on the numbers dead, but actually I think the real issue is the people who are left behind, like Saddam, who have to deal with the trauma of not just the physical loss but actually a fear of an actual fear of the drones.

They buzz overhead all the time, so he is actually quite fearful of them and he says he tries to shut out the noise by going into his room. So he lives with that trauma and that loss daily and it will be with him for the rest of his life.

STEVE CANNANE: The US authorities say these strikes are surgical. Was there any reason to think there were insurgents in Saddam's house?

MADIHA TAHIR: Not that I have been able to find out and as the US Government doesn't really talk about what they're doing in Pakistan or what the CIA is doing in Pakistan, it's really hard to know what it was, if anything, that they were targeting. A lot of these strikes are not actually targeting people that are high level militants, they're targeting based on what they call pattern of life which is basically looking at networks, social networks of people and targeting people with what they deemed to be suspect behaviour.

STEVE CANNANE: Is it possible that drone strikes are saving more civilian lives in Pakistan than they are taking? The New American Foundation estimates around 2,000 militants have been killed by drone strikes. It is a good chance that those militants would have been planning attacks against Pakistani civilians?

MADIHA TAHIR: The New America Foundation's figures come out of English language news reports. They actually do not do any of their own independent research. The situation on the ground is quite muddy. There are journalists, local journalists in north Waziristan, but it's quite difficult to get the information out.

The organisation that has actually been doing independent research is the Bureau of Investigative Journalists based in the UK and according to their figures, there are only about less than 300 named militants, of which 74 are what might be classified as high valued targets.

That is in nine years of drone attacks we have less than 300 people who we can actually identify as militants. As for the rest, we actually don't know who was killed. A lot of these reports, particularly the reports that come out immediately after an attack are ones that simply name sorry, they actually give us quotes by unnamed officials and we have absolutely no way of verifying who actually died in those attacks.

STEVE CANNANE: To follow up on that point, Brian Glenn Williams, the author of Predators, the CIA's drone war on al-Qaeda says he has uncovered literally hundreds of cases, potentially saving scores of civilian whose were their intended targets?

MADIHA TAHIR: Without the data, it's hard to say. I think, so that would be the first thing, the US would need to release the data for us to be able to actually make that a adjudication.

But beyond that, if the long term goal is to end terrorism, it's certainly true that there is a correlation between the drone attacks over the last nine years and the increase in terrorist attacks on Pakistanis in Pakistan. So they are certainly not helping Pakistanis.

In fact, there was an army funded study that came out earlier this year that said drones are actually likely to kill 10 times more civilians. There is another study more recently also by the army which effectively concluded that they did not know after nine years whether these drones had been effective. Different studies come to actually diametrically opposite conclusions. One study says that in the wake of a drone attack, there is actually a decrease in terrorism. And another study says exactly the opposite. So we have no idea what's going on and in what way this is actually broadly effective in terms of ending terrorism.

STEVE CANNANE: In a speech that he gave in May, President Obama promised more transparency in regard to America's drone program. Has anything changed since that speech in May?

MADIHA TAHIR: Not at all. In fact, recently it was reported, I think only just a day ago, that the CIA will continue to handle the program, so we are not likely to see any transparency or for that matter accountability from the American Government, but I think it's also important to understand that the transparency and accountability rhetoric is something that is coming out of human rights organisations and it is critical understandably.

We as American citizens ought to know what the government is doing in our name, however, this is not something, not a demand that is coming out of North Waziristan. If you actually speak to the survivors of these attacks or families of the dead, they simply want these attacks to stop. They're not calling for President Obama to be transparent. They're asking him to stop the attacks, so I think we have to differentiate between the demands of the human rights organisations and the demands that are coming out of the places that are actually being targeted.

STEVE CANNANE: Last week the family of a 67-year-old midwife who was allegedly killed by a drone strike in Waziristan travelled to the US and testified to the Congress there about the impact the drones had had on their family and on their village. What was the response like in the US?

MADIHA TAHIR: I think it's shameful that only five Congressmen actually showed up to the Congressional hearing. There is an unmanned aerial vehicle Caucus in Congress and none of those people who are on that caucus who basically push for more use of unmanned aerial vehicles in various aspects of our lives did not bother to actually show up and take a look at what these machines that they're pushing for are doing.

So that was very problematic, but it was heartening to see them actually here and there was a fair amount of coverage of the Congressional testimony, the delivered testimony. I think what was most startling is that Nabila, the nine-year-old girl who was injured in the drone attack that killed her grandmother is actually, she has not known a life without drones. She is nine-years-old and the attacks have been going on for nine years and so we now have an entire generation that has actually literally grown up under the eye of the drone.

STEVE CANNANE: Well let's talk more about the impact it's having on children because I think her brother as well Suibaer (phonetic) had been hit with shrapnel in the leg and he told the US Congress that he no longer likes days with blue skies because they are the days when the drones potentially attack. He said children in his village are too scared to play outside and too scared to go to school. What did you hear on the ground about the impact this is having on children?

MADIHA TAHIR: Yes, I've heard this over and over. The buzzing terrifies kids, particularly at night. These drones fly very low. The buzzing is really loud and in Pashto, the term for the drone bunginar zunginar (phonetic) is actually named after the buzzing of a bee. This is how they know the drone, this is how they experience is daily.

One teenager that I had spoken to who actually survived an attack had to have both of his legs amputated because they were crushed in the attack. He was absolutely traumatised. He talked to me about the nightmares that he suffered from, he wouldn't go around to the side of the house that had been attacked out of fear that it might be attacked again.

He actually finally, he actually succumbed to his injuries, he passed away last year, but he lived a life of absolute trauma. Another teenager, another teenage boy lost an eye in the first drone attack that Obama conducted when he first took office in the US in 2009 and he, too, was talking to me about the kinds of after effects, they had to actually have to go through the rubble and pick up the body parts of what once used to be his uncle's and his kin. So this is a really traumatising process.

You're not even left with a whole body, in this particular case, with Nabila and the family that came here to give testimony, the grandmother's body was actually so destroyed that the sons were not allowed to see it.

STEVE CANNANE: Is this radicalising young Pakistanis and turning them against America?

MADIHA TAHIR: Well, again, as I said, there is, first of all, there are studies that come out that say diametrically opposite things. Some of these studies talk about the fact that there is an increase in terrorism, so one can think of that as possibly having radicalised people, but other studies say that actually there is a decrease in terrorism, so it's hard to know.

Certainly I think for the people who have lost family members, I don't think anybody forgets when one loses a family member in this horrific fashion, having said that, I think the debate about whether they are being radicalised is a very, it is actually a kind of a selfish debate in the sense that we only care about what happens to these people to the extent as to whether there is a blowback for us.

I think we have to first of all consider their lives and the fact that their communities have been destroyed for the last nine years and that they are going to have to deal with this loss for long, long after we've forgotten about this, rather than actually thinking about this.

STEVE CANNANE: True, but there is a blowback to the Pakistanis because the Pakistani Taliban are blowing up Pakistani civilians as well?

MADIHA TAHIR: Absolutely. I mean they get more and more horrific every single time. After (inaudible) was killed in 2009, they carried out, conducted a series of attacks, including actually on a CIA base in Afghanistan, but most of those attacks happened, you know many of those attacks happen in Pakistan on Pakistanis.

TOM IGGULDEN: Madiha, just finally. A week ago a drone strike killed Hakimullah Mehsud the head of the Pakistani Taliban, a group which has killed thousands of Pakistanis in recent years. He also sponsored the failed Times Square bombing in New York City. Is this a legitimate use of drones, a case of killing a terrorist before he kills more Pakistanis and potentially more Americans?

MADIHA TAHIR: Hakimullah Mehsud was absolutely a vicious man. He was involved in the attack that I just mentioned on the CIA base in Afghanistan as well, and the CIA vowed to get revenge for that attack.

So, you know, and I have no love for him, absolutely not, but I think it's not actually about Hakimullah Mehsud himself. It's about, the question should be what can we do to bring peace and normalise this area and not have it live in this endless kind of violence? And with the killing of Hakimullah Mehsud, what happened is when the peace talks were going ahead, there were three options.

One was basically that the most unlikely one was that we would actually come to an agreement with the TTP. The second was that one would not come to an agreement with the TTP but perhaps the pressure from these negotiations would splinter these groups further so the government could co-op them. The third option is that the talks came to nothing and that the government and particularly the Pakistani military would be forced actually to take forthrightly take a stand on this issue and come forward and stand with the Pakistani people against these insurgents.

That process and that strategy is, you know was destroyed when Hakimullah was killed. So I think yes, he is a horrific guy, but this is not about him, this is about the violence in the area that ordinary people have to deal with, and we have to try and figure out how to lesson that violence.

STEVE CANNANE: Madiha Tahir, we've run out of time. Thanks so much for joining us tonight.